Presidential voting

Moving the goalposts

IN NEARLY every political race in a democracy, the rules are simple: the candidate that gets the most votes wins. The American presidency is a notable exception: four times in the past 200 years the loser of the popular vote has taken the oath of office. For three of those four cases blame the Electoral College. This unloved and Byzantine body emerged during America’s founding as a compromise between those who wished for direct popular election of a president and those who preferred that the president be elected by Congress. Hundreds of constitutional amendments have been floated to end or amend the Electoral College; yet it remains.

While the constitution mandates the existence of the Electoral College, states are free to decide how to apportion their electoral votes. In every state but two, the winner of the statewide popular vote gets all of the state’s electoral votes. The two exceptions, Nebraska and Maine, each give two electoral votes to the popular-vote winner, and apportion the rest to the popular-vote winner in each congressional district. That can produce splits. In 2008, for instance, John McCain won four of Nebraska’s five electoral votes by winning the popular vote and two congressional districts, but Barack Obama’s strong performance in Omaha, the state’s biggest city, let him peel off one elector.

Those systems have survived numerous attempts to change them. Between 2006 and 2011, eight states and the District of Columbia enacted, and every state legislature in the country considered, bills that would pledge all their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, but only when states with a majority of the country’s 538 electoral votes have done the same (the electoral votes pledged currently total just 132). Once triggered, this provision, formally known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would guarantee that the popular-vote winner would always win the presidency.

In the year after the 2000 election, which Al Gore lost to George W. Bush despite receiving over 500,000 more votes, 29 states proposed vote-allocation changes, mostly from the winner-take-all system that 48 states and the District of Columbia use to the district system of Nebraska and Maine.

A similar fondness for the district system has emerged in the wake of the 2012 election. But while the 2000 proposals occurred in states with both Democratic and Republican governors and legislators, and seemed driven by the sense that the Electoral College had thwarted the popular will, the most recent wave of proposals begins and ends with Republicans.

In early January Bill Carrico, a Republican state senator from Virginia, introduced a bill to apportion his state’s electoral votes as Nebraska and Maine do, but with the two additional electors going to whichever candidate wins the most districts, a cunning scheme that would have seen Mitt Romney win eight of Virginia’s 13 electoral votes, instead of zero.

In the past month officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all states that Mr Obama won that happen to have Republican governors—have flirted with similar proposals. Reince Preibus, who heads the Republican National Committee, said that electoral-vote reapportionment was something that “states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at.” In 2012, if all 50 states had apportioned their electoral votes as Nebraska and Maine did, Mr Romney would have beaten Mr Obama 276-262 despite having lost the popular vote by nearly four full points.

As it turns out, Mr Carrico’s bill died in committee, and officials in other states now seem to be slowly backing away. The problem with the Republican proposal is not the gamesmanship; both sides play electoral games: consider, for instance, the relative number of visits from candidates received by swinging little New Hampshire and big blue California. The problem for the party is that it continues a defensive, backward-looking and ultimately losing strategy of the last election, in which Republicans tried to keep non-white voters from voting rather than engaging with them. Instead of trying to thwart the popular vote, Republicans might be a lot better off trying to win it.

"...Romney would have beaten Mr. Obama...despite having lost the popular vote..."

Who is to say what the popular vote would have been, or what the electoral college vote would have been under any change to the system. The campaign would have been completely different, as it would be if the electoral college were abolished.

While the present system is an 18th century anachronistic compromise, it is likely the best system other than (perhaps) a straight popular vote, and it consistent with the principles of federalism.

If the 2012 election campaign was fought under a straight popular vote system who knows what the outcome might have been. Both candidates would have spent most of their time in the places where they spent very little in this past campaign. Both candidates would have campaigned heavily in CA, NY and TX (getting 35% of the vote out in California would be more important than 80% of the vote in Utah) and all the appearances and messages would be less directed at voters of any particular state.

These plans astonish me a little bit, because it seems like a very public admission by the GOP that they need to significantly regrade the playing field in order to win. It’s the sort of thing you would expect from a dying party, and one wonders if their base will come to the conclusion that that’s exactly what they are.

The real, big problem with using congressional districts as the basis for allocating the bulk of electoral votes is all the gerrymandering.
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The practice is reaching the point of truly corroding the quality/credibility of our representative government.
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Hopefully more citizens/groups from all points on the political spectrum bring more suits to the courts on this matter, and push for non-partision commissions to assume responsibility for drawing electoral districts.
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Otherwise, considering the voter's rights acts/civil righs acts of the 1960s, could Congress mandate that electoral disricts for their elections be done by a widely recognized non-partisan body?

There is nothing wrong with the Electoral College, it works as designed and has served the USA well. With the rampant voter fraud allowed by different election laws across 50 states, and incompetent supervisors of elections, the Electoral College is the least of the worries that must be addressed. In the recent November 2012 presidential election, I asked for a second vote counting machine months in advance and was denied.
Supervisor of Elections and her staff failed to do any testing on how long it would take a 7 page ballot to be scanned by the vote counting machine even when early voting turned up problems with the processing speed resulting in lines 3-4 hours long. Naturally no one was fired. Voters stopped coming to my precinct at 5.15PM due to TV broadcasts of long lines even though the poll was open until 7PM. If you were in line at 6.59PM the poll stays open until you cast your vote.
Supervisor of Elections went on TV to apologize, cry and blame funding issues for the shortage of machines, costing $5,000 each, even though she returned $1 million back to the state months earlier.
Fire people, bring in professional managers to get the job done correctly, fix voter registration laws and make them as uniform as possible across all 50 states. Lastly, the USA covers 5 major time zones; after waiting 4 years, there is absolutely no need for the media to declare state by state, the winner in a presidential election minutes after the polls close in a state. This clearly influences voter turnout across the country and the election.

This may be just the beginning of the nefarious schemes being cooked up by the increasingly radicalized "conservatives" in the GOP to maintain their sweaty grip on power. These cornered terrorists are not concerned with the public welfare but with protecting the privileges of wealth. They feel themselves unconstrained by logic, morality, or the law as they fight for selfish, partisan gains. They constitute a virulent danger to America and themselves.
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The flailing Repugs will inevitably be displaced by a future-oriented third party. This cannot happen too soon!

Sounds about right looking at Boeing's Dreamliner with first orders taken in 2004 and first delivery in 2007 and 50 to date. The impact of the Lico batteries has yet to be seen. Metric Airbus sends their regards!

"In the year after the 2000 election, which Al Gore lost to George W. Bush despite receiving over 500,000 more votes. . . "

Let's be clear: HISTORY WILL NEVER KNOW IF AL GORE WON THE POPULAR VOTE. Remember that absentee ballots are not counted if there are enough votes to sway the electoral college to one side. For example, if a candidate wins by 100,000 votes in the general election and only 50,000 absentee ballots were cast, those votes are not counted because they would not make a difference. Since most absentee voters are military and tend towards the conservative, it is likely that had they been counted Bush would received far more popular votes. We will never know.

So the homogeneous group that has sworn an oath to their assault weapons to protect "our" liberty and defend "all of us" from the threat of tyranny, would like to change the voting method in such a way that perverts the system further away from the ideal of "One person, one vote"?
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Interesting...

Good to hear from you, Hamakko! And thanks for the Happy New Year. It so happens this is New Year on the Lunar Calendar which my family celebrate. So indeed Happy New Year back! It's great to hear your thoughts too!
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I think more than any other time in the history of the country, many things aren't working out in the manner folks on the Far Right want. And so they are frustrated and angry. The perception is too many rights are given away to people they don't like. They try to articulate their reasons. Problem is all those reasons clash in one way or another with the Constitution. So they strain to find an alternate authority to the Constitution. Well, the alternate authority will have to be God because God is the only thing bigger than the Constitution. It almost worked. Trouble is they couldn't agree on what their God says among themselves. It's all very mind-boggling.

I wish you were right. Pileggi is about to introduce the bill in PA next month. Stay tuned. There's still hope in them thar hills for more ethical lapses from repugs. I think its just in their blood. Trying too hard to catch up with the old dem machinations I guess.

If the presidency is determined by popular vote, then from that point on all presidents will be elected by the urban political machines -- which are Democratic machines and by definition they are corrupt. So, can you really expect the political machine to choose honest and incorruptible men for the office of president?

No, what we'll get is a continuation of the struggle for power, only without any constraints. The individual citizens will be the loser, as the government gets bigger and more powerful and more corrupt. Civic virtue will disappear in its entirety. This leviathan will be able to do what it wants, either by amending the Constitution or by simply appointing judges who will ignore the Constitution.

The Carrico scheme illustrates the hypocrisy behind most of these cockamamie proposals for "reform." I think the Maine plan is a fair one, but only if the legislative districts are laid out fairly. If Romney would have won had this scheme been in use everywhere, it is likely due to Gerrymandering by state legislatures.

The composition of American society has changed a lot, particularly after the Second World War.In view of these changes, innovative ideas and steps are needed to retain and refresh the vibrancy of American democracy. Absence of such restructuring will seriously undermine the dynamism of the American society as a whole in a very crucial phase of its history. This debate should go beyond the peculiarities of electoral college and Presidential voting.

Remember that the discussion was popular votes, not exclusively military. One study conducted in 2001 determined that there were up to two million "lost" votes throughout the U.S., including absentee votes. In a nation that prides itself on being a model democracy, it's clear the system was, and remains, broken. Because that system reported that Al Gore won the popular vote, I highly question its accuracy.

The study was published in the New York Times on 15 September 2002; the investigators were from California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The electoral college is just fine the way it is... whether states use a winner-takes-all method or give an EV to the winner of each congressional district. Either way, it's consistent with the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

Abandoning the electoral college, by switching to the use of the popular vote to decide the presidency, would be the end of the republic.

Yes I was in FL, but my precinct was far more republican than democrat. The root problem is supervisor of elections are unqualified to perform basic math calculations. 12 hours x 60 minutes = 720 minutes. Walking up to the machine, inserting the 4 page ballot with 7 pages of data (counting front and back), processing ballot, walk away takes 1 minute average. 720 / 1 = 720 ballots in 12 hours. Pretty complex calculation, right? No one timed this before the early voting and failed to add machines.

My voter role was over 2700 voters. 3200+ was the breakpoint for a second machine. Supervisor knows who voted early and number of absentee ballots processed. Best case 500 pre voted. 2200+ left to vote. Say 50% turnout = 1100+ voters to a machine that can only handle approximately 720 in 12 hours.

Even with having to change out the collection box in the machine (full), I was able to close the precinct at 7.20PM with over 840 ballots processed due to managing the process better. Damn I am good!

Silly? Maybe, but still the foot is a very useful distance for measuring. I'm over 40 but quite well versed in the metric system (I have a biochem degree, science is mostly metric. mostly). 1/3 meter is close enough and sounds better than 0.03077 meters (and 1 foot actually equals 30.48cm).
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Also, don't forget that we americans are a very stubborn bunch who like to do things our own way. And, unlike the Brits, we don't use "stone" as a measure of weight, so we're ahead there.